Mutually Neutral Knowledge (was:...)

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

David Morris, safe, warm and dry, it is hoped, from the
ravages of Lilly- not quite as devastating as her sister,
Audrey, in '57- still, no small rain, that, quotes:

>>P. 567

"So Slothrop is borne, afloat on the water-leas.  Like signals set out for 
lost
travelers, shapes keep repeating for him, Zonal shapes he will allow to enter
but won't interpret, not anymore.  The most persistent of these, which seem to
show up at the least real times of day, are the stairstep gables that front so
many of these ancient north-German buildings, rising, backlit, a strangely
_wet_ gray as if risen out of the sea, over these straight and very low
horizons.  They hold shape, they endure, like monuments to Analysis.  Three
hundred years ago mathemeticians were learning to break the canonballs rise 
and
fall into stairsteps of range and height, delta-x and delta-y, allowing them 
to
grow smaller and smaller, approaching zero as armies of eternally shrinking
midgets galloped up stairs and down again, the patter of their diminishing 
feet
growing finer, smoothing out into continuous sound.  This analytic legacy has
been handed down intact - it brought the technicians at Peenmunde to peer at
Askanian films of rocket flights, frame by frame, delta-x and delta-y,
flightless themselves... film and calculus, both pornographies of flight."

>>Slothrop has shut down Analysis.  For him it has become “pornography.”  
But for
the rest of us such a finding that off-switch  is nearly impossible, at least
in the waking state.  The most annoying and endless round of questions a child
asks begins with a “why” and continues with another “why” in response to 
each
answer.  Every child has done it.

>>Has Slothrop surpassed Kute Korrespondences?  Has he gotten past Paranoia? 
Contrary to “a knotting into,” Slothrop’s path in the Zone seems to have 
been a
progressive disentanglement from all plots and allegiances.  His allegiance to
his own “identity,” especially that of his nationality, has been hard to 
break,
but that too seems to be waning.

>>So, is Slothrop moving past Analysis into another mode, and if so, what is 
it? 
Anti-paranoia?  I’m not sure if that’s it.  I’d call it the “Unfiltered
Experience,” which might be akin to “Nirvana,” if one can handle it.  Is
Slothrop approaching the Buddha?<<


Ah, but Pynchon was young (like you were, once) and still
fairly idealistic when he wrote that great GR passage you
quote, which I'm fairly sure contains at least some measure
of ironic self-reflection- pornography meaning literally:
writing about (or for) prostitution. So, I think we can 
indulge him, the way Wicks and Wade indulge 'Thelmer,
and forgive such youthful excesses, at least in GR. 

But even then he recognized that there remained
undescribed, unfilmed, unanalyzed something behind
The Word, although these days he might suggest that
"we" are doing the hiding and "It" is in plain sight.

Thus "Immanuel," to negotiate for us the currents 
between ourselves, and what we might have been.
But not without a price, of course, for providing
some agreed upon lexicon, some mutual code by
which to signal our individual claims for death, or
requirements for mercy.

regards